Assessing Thomas Carlyle’s Place in Modern Historiography

This paper aims at assessing the modern reception of Thomas Carlyle's historical writings. Recent assessments focus on Carlyle's historical practice and the latest editions show a penchant for Quellenforschung, that is an interest in Carlyle's historical sources. A rigorous investigation of Carlyle's sources has been underway on several fronts, including the in the University of California Press Strouse critical editions, Oxford University Press's The French Revolution, and in Duke University Press's Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle. This return to the sources augurs a steady balancing of the scholarship as it moves away from an emphasis on Carlyle's literary style in his histories and the perspective of history as literature, toward evaluating Carlyle's histories as contributions not only to Romantics historiography, but to the theory and philosophy of history.